The Year Winds Down
I have sent my Rhapsittie Street Kids review to my editor, and with how everything is timed that looks as if it's going to be the final review of the year. I wanted to get that review done before my Atlantis II review because my editor and I are still getting used to things, and I want the difficulty curve to be as reasonable as possible. A 40 minute TV special would be much easier to do than a sequel movie, which requires clips from two different movies. This means that I might have to do another movie before Atlantis II ''in terms of practicality and making things easier. But I do want to get ''Atlantis II done in January. And I want to wait until I get that Rapsittie Street Kids review back before I decide which reviews are my favorite. Although, I just want to say, I think that this has been my best year so far. My original goal was to get 1 review a week, or 52 videos. I... made it to 34, but considering that I was in chronic debilitating pain for seven months, I think that that's a pretty good score. I said that I wanted to do three videos a month, or one around every 10 days. This translates to 36 reviews that I want to do next year, and I think that that's a pretty good goal. No, I don't think that this year was my best because of the amount of reviews that I did, but the quality of them. This year probably holds the record of the most reviews I could immediately point to and call my favorite. Shark Tale; Nurm uf Teh Nurth; The Telescope; Homer Badman; Finally a Lesson; Worst Cartoon Themes; Painbow. This year was the year that I decided to take what I did like really seriously, and I think it paid off. I started treating it more like a job/career, and while that does really harm some people's productivity, I think that it really helped. I wanted to do bigger projects and I wanted to be clearer and I just wanted to do better. It also might have something to do with what I chose to review. This year's "worst episodes I've reviewed list" is actually going to give me some trouble. I didn't go after that many "so bad, it's horrible" shows, and some of them I did, like Paddy the Pelican, were hard to take seriously even on the merits of being horrible. The only ones that I can think of that I'd put in that category that might line up with "the worst that I've ever reviewed" were Da Boom Crew, Kung Fu Dino Posse, The Nutshack, ''and ''Legends of Chamberlain Heights. Definitely not as many as I've reviewed in prior years, especially 2014 (Breadwinners, Mega Babies, Adult Party Cartoon, Over Two Rainbows, Pixel Pinkie, Mr. Pickles, ''and that's just the short list). I blame my pain for that one. I wasn't keen on tackling the next ''Adult Party Tycoon while writhing with pain. I did the first two before the pain really started and I did the latter two after it stopped. I don't know if anyone noticed, or really cared, but I do like to have a variety on the quality spectrum for Animated Atrocities. ----- And then there was that... copyright problem from earlier in the year, with Pixel Pinkie. That was fun. I've heard some things about Pacific Heat, which is another Australian show. Lately, I've kind of cooled down about talking about YouTube because... I've kind of lost hope that they would ever change and get better. They started this year by randomly deleting IHE's channel due to spam and they ended it by making a YouTube rewind with more non-YouTube personalities than people from their own site, starting with the Rock, who is a movie star who moved to YouTube, and the Damn Daniel guy, who was a Vine star (not a YouTube star) got more screentime than PewDiePie, who is the most subscribed channel on the site. I may sound like a hipster for saying this, but what's happening is that YouTube is selling out and trying to go mainstream, abandoning the audience that made it big. That's what the "ad-friendly" content shit was about. Speaking of that, if advertisers can choose which videos they get placed on, can I as a user blacklist certain ads? For some stupid reason, YouTube has let adblock run a massive ad campaign on their site right now. If you do use adblock, I'm not going to condemn you for it. It's just stupid that YouTube is letting them advertise on their site, when that actively does harm both YouTube and its users. YouTube doesn't have time to fix a glitch that's unsubscribing people to various channels. But they have enough time to make a video lying about how there's no problem whatsoever. They also have the time to change what the upload button looks like, and make looking at comments through the bell thing even worse then before. Oh yeah, and then there was the YouTube heroes bullshit. They trusted the commentators to report "negative content" so much that they disabled the comments on that video, which is now the 12th most disliked video on the entire site. But it's okay, they managed to change what the video said by uploading the video to the same URL. Hey YouTube, that would be a very nice feature for us YouTube users to have. You know, if we accidentally leave a glitch in the video or a tiny mistake that we can fix when our audience catches it, and not spam them with a reupload of a video that they've already watched. Then YouTube changes the algorithm. I'm not complaining that they did that. It has to happen occasionally. What I'm complaining about it is them doing it in December, which is supposed to be a YouTuber's best month. If you're going to implement a change like this it's the most beneficial to do it in January or one of those dump months so users can acclimate to it without really losing much. And the algorithm change benefits large corporations and big networks that have migrated to YouTube enmasse. Which doesn't bode well for the people who made YouTube what it is. The problem has been stated that "YouTube doesn't listen to its users." That's technically inaccurate. The problem is that "YouTube doesn't have to listen to its users." It does need to listen to big corporations because they bring in money, and when they don't comply to corporations Viacom sues them. Meanwhile, the YouTube users fall into generally three categories. 1. The very small YouTubers. If they leave the site, YouTube doesn't lose anything financially, so YouTube doesn't have to cater to them. And as a bonus for them, if they accidentally or intentionally screw them over, the word usually doesn't get out far enough, so YouTube believes that they can get away with screwing them over. 2. The YouTubers who just started doing YouTube for a living. If they leave YouTube, it's career suicide. Other sites either don't offer any monetization, like Facebook or Vid.me, or they don't have a wide enough audience, like Vimeo or Dailymotion. Or some combination of both. And moving to a different site can realistically cut your audience down to one tenth. These YouTubers need YouTube more than YouTube needs any of them individually, so YouTube believes that they can get away with screwing them over. 3. The big YouTubers who have made millions of dollars already. They've made so much money off of YouTube, so why complain? That's what their audience is going to think anyway - "if you hate it so much, then just retire" , and that's probably what YouTube thinks, so YouTube believes that they can get away with screwing them over. Every YouTuber falls into one of those categories. They need someone to break their monopoly. Right now there are a few glimmers of hope. The first one is patreon. If someone can make enough money through private donations, they can get off of the site and go somewhere else. Although, that is very unlikely to happen. Facebook wants to start allowing users to monetize their content, but Facebook is... evil. Beyond ignoring freebooting, their privacy invasion policies are horrifying, and you need to pay a lot of money to get your videos viewed. Their skeevy as hell, and I dislike that company more than I dislike the company of YouTube. The other hope is in Vid.me, which is this year's new video-hosting start up and it looks to be promising. It's a lot more functional than Zippcast or Dailymotion. Videos play well, and the site doesn't really stutter. There are problems though. First of all, there is no monetization. And that is the cornerstone to breaking YouTube's monopoly. I'm going to start uploading there, but because this is my career, my videos have to premiere on YouTube. I also don't know their copyright policies yet, which could be an issue. My Vid.me can be found here: vid.me/MrEnter ------ I do hope that I can transcend YouTube somehow. I know that I need a safety net of some kind. That may have been quite a bit of the motivation for getting my novel done. I was afraid of dying, in both the literal and the figurative sense without having a fallback. I know that a lot of people are getting sick of me talking about this thing by now, but first of all, it's not like I'm going around saying link (and I could do that), and in an indirect way, Growing Around as a project as improved my videos. My editor, the voice actors who frequently pop into the videos, that animation you saw in my top 20 worst theme songs list - they all came from members of the Growing Around ''team. A lot of my goals on last year's New Year's Resolution list were to write the first draft of a bunch of fleeting ideas like ''Eden of the Stars or Children of the Skies. Does it count if you don't fulfill a resolution in technicality, but you do do it in spirit? Well, what about the opposite - because I did solve a rubix cube, but I don't know how or remember how to. I didn't write a first draft of any of the books I said I was, but I wrote the first draft of a different book. And the last draft. And I published the fucking thing too. An obvious resolution would be to "write the sequel" but I don't know if I want to do that immediately. I've said this before, but after you've completely written a book, you hesitate to go through that process all over again. But I do want to do something with the series. I think that now is the time. I need to do something with a more obvious appeal than a book. I mean, I did write a script, I'm going to be writing more scripts just to play with my characters. In fact, I'm writing a Christmas... or Miracle Day... script right now to see if I can actually write a goddamn musical. Also, Meghan drew this, and I did the coloring This is what Sally would be dressed like in any winter-setting episode. By the way, that is a present bow in her hair. And yes, now that the book is out of the way, I am back to the grind in learning how to draw. That was another resolution, but I never succeeded. I'd say "there's always next year" but this year I've been painfully aware that that's not always the case. I feel that I need to do something more... visual for the series. One thing that I know I need to do is actually make a website specifically for Growing Around. But here's the problem with that, I cannot for the life of me, find a web host that actually lets you code your own HTML and actually you know... design a website. I want to actually create a website, but all of these hosts - freewebs, wix, godaddy - they only offer you drag-and-drop shit. And wordpress/blogspot are not web hosts. People keep pointing me to them, but they are blogging ''websites; not web hosts. Another thing that I wanted to do that seems to be the next logical step is make an audiobook. The problem with that is that... I just couldn't read it myself. Well, I could, but I am a grown adult man and the story is from the first person perspective of an eight year old girl. I mean, I might do it just to be funny, but for an audio book, I'd need someone who can sound like a child without being grating. A lot of people say they imagine Sally's dialogue sounding like Kristen Schaal... so there's that. Oh, that reminds me, ''Growing Around now has a wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growing_…. I can't really edit it myself because wikipedia kind of frowns on that, but if you're so inclined, you can. I do want to do something beyond the audio book and the website though. Maybe now's the time to start trying to make it an animation again. Start with something small. Maybe the animation would help raise the book's success and vice-versa. It's just a thought that I'm toying with right now. I do know that the end goal has largely changed. Back in the beginning, I had this crazy pipe dream of getting my show on networks. That portion of things was stupid for a variety of reasons, but the one that's most pertinent is that I want what's best for my series and I can safely guarantee that being put on any of the three networks would not be best for it. I've complained about Nickelodeon a lot, and C.H. Greenblatt has talked a lot about the working conditions behind it. And Cartoon Network... oh boy. This year, they've went off of the deep end. You know, considering what happened this Thanksgiving it's possible that no Cartoon Network show besides Teen Titans Go might ever be able to air another holiday episode ever again. And they only made two new in-house shows this year: Mighty Magiswords (which is... eh) and Powerpuff 2016. Powerpuff 2016 needs to be juxtaposed against another show - one that doesn't exist - Galactic Kids Next Door. You've probably heard recently that Tom Warburton wanted to do a spin-off of his old show, Kids Next Door. He's been pretty passionate about it. So what does Cartoon Network do? They say no, and then they reboot a show that had no demand and has no involvement from its original creator because of fucking toys. Disney channel doesn't get out of this either. Now, Disney was the company that brought television cartoons to the next level, with their Disney afternoon. DuckTales was the very first syndicated cartoon and they actually proved that you could be profitable without making a show to sell toys, which was the theme for most of the 80's. They took chances on things that not only had no guaranteed chance for success, but had failed in the past. Now what do they do? Well, they air a cartoon for a few episodes and then boot it onto Disney XD where they suffer from failing ratings until they eventually get cancelled, so Disney has more room for sitcoms. Networks give you the money and the audience, but the only price is making you wonder why you even bothered. Saberspark recaps their problems very good in these videos, that I recommend everyone watch: (Nick) link (Cartoon Network) link (Disney Channel) link ------ If I could actually get Growing Around to the animation stage, it's most likely going to be an internet show. There are many reasons, but by all accounts that would be the smartest and the safest thing to do. And the most important reason is that it would be the best for any potential series. Right now, the book has already completely paid off the cost I put into it, which is very uplifting, and I do hope to take this to the next level. Who knows what 2017 will bring? I might do another New Years' Resolution list, although I think this might count towards that. And remember link Category:Miscellaneous